The Adoption

David Schein: 802-640-4639 dafschein@gmail.com

Tracking the coming of age of brothers and sisters, friends and cousins across the cultural divide and set in Ethiopia/Chicago/Dubai/China through twenty years of the most rapid development Africa has ever known, The Adoption is contemporary and international, tracking the lives of kids growing up today in tomorrow’s world.

When Lisa and Marc discover that their adopted Ethiopian baby, Kakidane, is not really an orphan and find her birth-family living in poverty in Ethiopia, so begins “The Adoption,” an international coming of age story that parallels the life of Kalkidane growing up in Chicago with the lives of her brothers and sisters in Ethiopia

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

The Adoption contrasts Kalkidane’s and her siblings’ stormy paths through adolescence as they go through puberty and seek power in their different worlds. Kalkidane yearns for the culture she was snatched from and is torn by her “privilege.” Her Ethiopian siblings, growing up in severe poverty, fight a hard survival game to get an education and to avoid patriarchy, tribalism and harmful traditional practices; one narrowly avoids becoming a prostitute, while the other indentures herself to an abusive employer in Dubai. Kakidane’s brother joins a tribe of street kids, and later becomes a leader of a nonviolent movement, The Army of Love, protesting the jailing of journalists and the Ethiopian military’s shooting of demonstrating students. At the end of the book, the siblings come together. Kalkidane, outraged by the police shooting of her boyfriend in Chicago, returns to Ethiopia to find her “real’ country” and joins her siblings at a huge ‘Army of Love,” demonstration on Bob Marley's Birthday in Shashamene in 2019, ground zero for the world-wide “Rastah” movement.